This what I wrote for my sister’s memorial. Eric read it aloud, as I am still somewhat hard to understand:
My sister, Peggy O’Neal, was born in 1957 in Modesto, California. We come from what’s considered an old family by small-town California standards. Our grandfather built the first house on River Road in Ceres, and if you’re from around there, you know that’s really something.
She was named for the song, “Peggy O‘Neal,” which was about the wife of John Eaton, a member of Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet. Apparently, the wives of the other cabinet members considered Peggy too low-class to be invited to their teas. (She was Irish; she once worked as a barmaid). Scandal ensued. As did a song. Now, more than 1 1/2 centuries later, the cabinet wives are all forgotten. Peggy is not.
Our Peggy’s trajectory always led North. She started out working for La Cooperativa in Riverside, California, then followed that company up to Sacramento, where she first started working in banks and credit unions. I can still remember her excitement when Summit Information came to her office to teach them a new accounting system for Credit Unions. She could do that, she thought, and what’s more, she’d be good at it. And what’s more, she liked it. This ultimately led to a job for her there—with lots of travel—and to her moving to Corvallis, Oregon, for a few years. Later on, strictly out of love for the area, she moved Seattle, at first working for Summit, after that, cobbling together a few different jobs, in order to stay here.
Somewhere in there she married Reuben Dumas, and after their divorce about five years ago, they remained good friends, like people often say they’ll do, but usually don’t. She meant it. Though she continued to consider Reuben a good person, he was a good person she did not want to be married to.
Her unexpected death has forced me to look closely at our shared upbringing. We really did grow up together, with all that means, in that little house on Parry Avenue in Modesto, back when it was a much smaller town than it now is. Our father’s death in 1968, allowed our mother’s mental illness to flourish. I left to join the Coast Guard when I was barely eighteen, leaving Peggy to live with our mom alone for three years. I still feel bad about that.
During our mom’s final years we both spent a lot of time around her. And I was surprised at how seamlessly Peggy and I fit into the culture of Central California. I guess you never much escape where you’re from, not that either of us wanted to.
I was especially surprised at the attitudes of all the friends, relatives, and neighbors. I assumed that Peggy and I were considered evil children, but this was not the case. It turns out everyone knew about her problems but felt they shouldn’t butt in. They thought the living-far-away thing was a survival tactic. They even celebrated it.
That, by itself changed the whole blueprint.
When I had the stroke, late in December 2017, in Boulder, Colorado, she came out instantly to help Eric take care of me. I have no memory of her being there, but that was during the period when I was not forming memories. It turns out that she met and got know many of my work colleagues and Eric. They all liked her a lot, and they continue to talk about her intelligence, humor, and compassion.
For me, she is a great model for the fact that real intelligence is tied to sense of humor. It’s sort of like, if you’re smart enough to know the difference between the way things are and the way they should be, you can’t help laughing.
Her untimely death hit me pretty hard. Part of that has to with the fact that, though it may not seem so, we are kind of alike: spiritual seekers, inclined that way by the pain we both experienced growing up. She’s always been on the edge, always trying something new, often adventuring into stuff disparagingly called New Age. Me, I’ve generally been more traditional. It was impossible to ignore each other. So we kept each other honest that way, neither letting the other fall into the fundamentalism that is our tendency. She and I were like two wings of the same bird.
But I think another part is the importance given to the 40 or 50 day period after someone dies in so many spiritual traditions. A death is never just about the person who dies. It’s an event that involves us all. Part of us dies with them; part of them stays on with us. And the real surprise is not that we become aware of this, but rather that it is totally ordinary.
So anyway, this is a memorial to Peggy.
May her memory live on among those of us who loved her, and even among those who just hear about her.
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